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Prasad touched the tamboura to his eyes and suddenly stood up. At that moment, Dinakar experienced the welling up of love for a child and he thought, ‘How sweet-natured and tall and beautiful this boy is.’
Prasad's eyes, which he had found so attractive, closed slowly. Then, standing with folded hands, Prasad went on to prostrate before him, as if to a god. Dinakar, feeling as if he had turned over, stood in awe, and could not find the words for blessing. Gently he touched Prasad's head, and Prasad came to his feet. Then, holding Prasad's face between his hands, Dinakar bent and smelt the crown of his head.
Gangu, watching from a distance, began to cry. She lit the lamp and said, as if to herself, ‘From now, my son is a sanyasi. He cannot touch anyone's feet after this. He has himself become the holy feet.’
Then she wiped her eyes with the end of her sari. Despite her sorrow in giving up all motherly hopes for her son, she did not neglect to treat Dinakar courteously, and saying, ‘Go, and come again,’ walked with him up to the gate.
Afterword
Was it being lost, or drowning in ecstasy?
Towards the end of Bhava, the young Prasad — who already possesses considerable spiritual stature — stands before his mother and says, ‘Who am I?’
At first, Gangu thinks her son wants to know who his father is; then she recognizes that Prasad is announcing his wish to explore the question at its deepest levels. But Gangu's initial reaction is understandable. To ask ‘Who am I?’ can be a spiritual practice, a mantra, a device for distinguishing between self and ego (‘I’ changes; ‘I’ accumulates layers: what, then, is the nature of my changing and changeable sense of being? And is there a part that doesn't change?); it is also an evanescent thought, a way of locating oneself in society, a means of identifying oneself to one's self — these and other variations on the theme are played out at the heart of Bhava.
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Bhava is like a mystery story, or series of mysteries both factual and metaphysical. (Most of the questions, however, don't get answered.) What happened on the night of Saroja's ‘murder’? Did she survive, and later kill herself, or was her death an accident? Had she been seduced — and impregnated — by Pundit? Whose son is Dinakar? Whose son is Prasad? Such concrete questions plot the tale. Perhaps equally compelling are the enigmas of human nature: how did Gangu, who seems so simple and direct, conduct intense, secret love affairs with two men — themselves close friends — at the same time? What explains Saroja's character? Is Pundit a rogue or a saviour? And, more generally, there is the mystery of extremes of being: on the one hand Sitamma, Chandrappa and Radha, who occupy their lives so placidly and unquestioningly; on the other hand Dinakar and Shastri — troubled, unstable, ambivalent — who torment themselves and hurt others.
The two men at the centre of the tale, Shastri and Dinakar, long for relief from uncertainty and anxiety. Their unsettled state of being is signalled by the fact that, when we first encounter them, both wear costumes extravagantly at odds with their inner lives. Despite the traditional garb of puranik (Shastri) and pilgrim (Dinakar), each is acutely aware of the discrepancy between public perception and inner reality, and so feels something of a hypocrite. Yet costumes can be shed. When ripe, the cocoon bursts; when ripe, a person can be transformed, can ‘turn over’ (as Dinkar thinks of it) as easily as one turns over in sleep.
Shastri is seventy, a far more conventional type than Dinakar, and limited in his taste for subjectivity and self-analysis. Since the death of Saroja, he has tried to redeem himself in the traditional and public spheres: he earns both merit and respect through his role of puranik, reciting ancient tales of the gods and saints. Yet in private life, he continues to be cruel and unable to control his violent temper, especially with his second wife and his daughter. His soul-searching never amounts to much more than wondering, ‘Why am I like this?’
But one day Shastri notices that a younger man in his railway carriage is wearing around his neck a Sri Chakra amulet that looks identical to the one Saroja used to wear, the one she was wearing when he killed her forty years before. And, astonishingly, the man resembles Saroja. This encounter plunges Shastri into crisis. For more than half a lifetime, he has lived and relived the guilt, jealousy, rage, fear, and remorse surrounding his attack on Saroja, whom he had covered with earth and left for dead. But if the amulet is Saroja's, it means she might have survived, that he might not be a murderer after all, and that the man wearing the amulet could be Saroja's son (and therefore Shastri's as well).
The shock of realizing that he may not be who he thought he was readies Shastri for transformation and a possible rebirth.
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In Samskara, Anantha Murthy's celebrated early novel, ‘The chaste Acharya commits an illicit act, and as a result his transformation begins’ (A.K. Ramanujan). In Bhava, Shastri discovers that he did not commit an illicit act, and as a result his transformation begins. So Shastri's experience might be viewed as a perverse inversion of the Acharya's rite of passage.
Shastri also lives out the Acharya's nightmares. Soon after Acharya sleeps with Chandri, the Acharya's wife dies and he decides to ‘go where the legs take me,’ and finds himself besieged by the crude and unfamiliar temptations of the outside world. He feels, ‘… my person has lost form, has found no new form.’ As one who has lost his old world and not yet found another, he dreads ‘being transformed from ghost to demon.’ But this he means figuratively: is he to be released from being like a disembodied ghost (preta), only to become a demon?
For Shastri, the dreaded transformation seems to be enacted literally. At times, he has felt without substance, like ‘a ghost in his own house,’ but increasingly he feels possessed by a deeply malevolent force, turned into a demon or other evil form. When he rapes Saroja, he couples with her like a demon; when he accuses her of becoming pregnant by Pundit, the ‘demon inside him [began] to wail and laugh grotesquely’; when he carries her body to bury her in the pit, ‘he strode like a gloating demon.’ Years after the crime, he says, ‘it seemed this body into which the demon had entered has never learned anything.’
And so, when he sees the amulet on Dinakar's neck, he wonders whether he is about to be possessed once again.
Dinakar, dressed in the black clothing of an Ayyappa devotee, has been undergoing a crisis of his own. That is why he has tried to lose (or find) himself through taking the Ayyappa vow—‘blacking out’ his accustomed dress, his eating and drinking habits, even his name, for the forty days of his pilgrimhood. In daily life, he is a famous television star, a man of the world who has had numerous sexual intrigues with women. But it has all come to seem wilful, stale and jaded.
At the end of his Ayyappa pilgrimage, Dinakar — who has lived nearly all his life as an orphan — has gone in search of Sitamma, the ‘other mother’ whom he had met more than twenty years earlier. He looks forward to her unconditional affection and an experience of renewal through contact with a simple, peaceful life. At forty-five, he is fully, even cynically, aware that he has been shallow and cruel, and that his present spiritual emptiness mirrors the way in which he has chosen to live. He suffers in part because his mind is alert and discerning; a ‘modern’ man, he is both blessed and cursed with the yearning for an integrated self to which his highly developed self-consciousness is an obstacle.